Sanders: ’No structural deficit by the time I leave’

These are edited excerpts of a U-T editorial board interview with San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders.

Q: What is the state of the city?

A: We’ve actually accomplished a lot. We broke ground on a brand new central library that’s been three decades in the making. We’ve launched managed competition with IT [information technology services] and the landfill and we’ve got the true managed competitions coming up. We’ll retain Comic-Con. That’s like a Super Bowl ever year for us. That has really helped us out in terms of the convention center expansion because I think that puts a face on it. San Diegans cut back their water use by double-digits so they’re conserving like they’ve never conserved before. Over the last 10 years, we’ve seen a tenfold decrease in the number of sewer breaks. Our crime rates are down in every category. There were only 29 homicides in San Diego last year, a city of 1.3 million people. Our police department working with the community has done an unbelievable job. We’ve also seen clean tech grow dramatically. We have one new start up every single day of the year including weekends in San Diego right now. Those jobs pay about double what a normal job in San Diego pays. And we will be working on our financial reforms and eliminating the structural deficit, that’ll be a two-year process. There will be no structural deficit by the time I leave in 2012. More than half of it will be done this year, we’re confident. And the rest of it will be done the following year. We’ll reduce our labor costs and we’ll go after pension reform again.

Q: Can you make any projection of savings in the short term on the managed competition proposals that are already launched?

A: Probably somewhere around $10 million a year. But that’s starting in 2013. It wouldn’t be in 2012.

Q: What about the brownouts at some fire stations?

A: If we have the revenue, we could restore them, but we don’t have any extra revenue.

Q: Both you and council President Tony Young are pretty confident that some City Council members who used to be opposed are now ready to really move quickly on managed competition.

A: I think a lot of messages were delivered with Prop. D. And those messages were “we don’t want to pay any more in taxes” and “we want you to quit screwing around on these reforms.” The rest of the council may not like it, but I think with the two new council members coming on they certainly got that message during their re-election attempts. I know Tony Young has gotten it. So I think you’ll see these things move forward. So we’ll see the landfill moving quickly. IT will be the slowest only because it’s the most complex. Street sweeping, public utilities, and then sidewalk and street maintenance. We’re also not too far away from being able to do park and rec, which is one of the big ones.

Q: The governor wants to eliminate local redevelopment going forward. Can you assess the impact of that?